Brave Software Sued for Reselling Stolen News Content to AI Rivals

Federal courts in Manhattan received lawsuits on Monday from major news organizations accusing Brave Software of acting as a middleman for stolen intellectual property.

The suits, filed by The Daily News, The New York Times, and affiliated papers, claim the technology company used high-speed scraping tools to harvest exclusive stories. Plaintiffs allege Brave then sold that content to generative AI firms, including Anthropic and Perplexity.

A complaint filed by The News and Tribune Publishing newspapers, which include The Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel, describes Brave as a supplier and distributor of copyrighted material.

The legal documents state that Brave provides a back door to its own browser users and to prominent AI companies. This access allows those entities to bypass paywalls while building their business models.

"Brave acts both like a burglar that misappropriates the content of publishers, and an AI 'fence' that sells stolen content to third parties," the lawsuit alleges. The filing further claims these third parties knowingly received the stolen content to help construct trillion-dollar businesses.

According to the complaint, Brave crawled and copied content from more than 30 billion webpages in its index. The suit says the company did not identify itself during this process. It also did not provide website owners with a mechanism to block the crawler.

Frank Pine, executive editor at Tribune Publishing and MediaNews Group, noted that paywalls are a critical revenue source for news organizations competing to produce original content.

The lawsuit details specific instances of the "Ask Brave" AI feature. In one example, a user prompted the chatbot to show articles from The Daily News published on a specific day. The bot listed 35 paywalled article titles. It then asked if the user wanted the full text and promised to fetch the complete versions.

In another scenario, a user asked about Orlando politics. The AI identified stories from The Orlando Sentinel, including coverage of a gubernatorial race. After further prompting, the bot reproduced text from the newspaper's coverage verbatim or in close paraphrase.

Steven Lieberman, an attorney for The News and its sister papers, said AI giants are desperate to avoid being caught stealing news directly. "Brave Software is selling them a back door to the journalism they know they have no right to," Lieberman said. "Buying stolen goods secondhand doesn't make them legitimate. Brave must be held responsible for laundering pirated reporting for the AI industry."

The new suits join a growing number of cases filed by news organizations and copyright owners against tech giants. The News, The Times, and other plaintiffs filed similar actions against OpenAI and Microsoft on the same day.

The complaint lists five legal claims. These include direct, contributory, and vicarious copyright infringement. Pine stated in a statement that the software company had made a mockery of intellectual property laws. He added that Brave pillages the internet and resells its gains while touting privacy features that he described as piracy. He noted the company attempts to delete evidence under its Zero Data Retention policy. Brave Software did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Anthropic or the other AI companies accused of buying the content.